calebbrown.id.au

Welcome and thankyou for joining me as I travel around South America.

Presently I am in the hostel in Quito feeling a little dizzy from the altitude (Quito is about 2800m above sea level) and very tired after a very strange few days of travel.

The journey started with a flight out of Sydney at 11 on Tuesday. We stopped in Auckland for an hour or so before flying to Santiago. I then went from the aeropuerto to a hotel in Santiago to burn up time during a 15 hour stop before my 3am flight to Quito via Panama. With so many hours of flights and only getting patchy sleep here and there on them has made the concept of time very transient. I feel a little like Edward Norton´s character in Fight Club.

The other rather amusing feat is that my last 7 out of 8 meals have been airplane food. The other meal was at a small quaint cafe in Santiago opposite Plaza Brazil. As I walked too and from the Plaza I felt very different. Mostly 'cause I was the only person wearing shorts in the chilly weather.

Other than that I've discovered that knowing a little bit of Spanish helps a lot. I feel a little more relaxed knowing that I can kinda read signs and kinda talk to people (it's more me talking and then not understanding what they say back).

Anyhow, tonight I´m planning on sleeping and getting used to this altitude. Tomorrow I will probably explore a bit of Old Town and then join in the fiesta that starts there at 8pm. I will probably check out a bit more of Quito for a few more days before starting the trek down to Loja (via Riobamba and the Nariz del Diablo hopefully). There I will spend 3 weeks with the Bakon´s who are some missos associated with my old church.

I hope things are going well back in sunny Australia. Feel free to drop me a line - I'd love to hear from you.

It's been 4 days since our church group landed back in Australia after our short, 2 week, mission to South East Asia. We learnt lots of things, had lots of fun and came back exhausted.

Some highlights were:

• Preaching in a church on a Sunday through a translator. I felt very privileged because I don't think many Christians will ever have the chance to do what I did.
• The team of Christians we worked with while over there. They were really encouraging and passionate about seeing their country transformed. Their dependancy on God and contentment was very exciting to see.
• Our team from Church! They did a great job, even when really tired. There were no fights or serious conflict and everyone pulled their weight. It was really encouraging to be serving with them.
• Teaching English and getting to know some of the students
• Visiting orphanages and seeing the faces of the children light up in big smiles
• Visiting a bible college. It was exciting seeing just how different it is to Australian bible colleges and how much God has blessed us in Australia. It was also great hearing the testimonies of some of the students and how they came to be studying at the college
• Playing a 40 minute soccer match in the hottest, most humid weather I've ever played sport. Marty's goal was a cracker and I've never been so happy to lose a game ever!
• The traffic. It was crazy random. But lots of fun. Especially when crossing the roads.
• Seeing God answer prayer and provide for us over and over again.

I was particularly challenged, after seeing how little the Christians had, at how content they were. It was also confronting to seeing how much I wanted to complain about things as I got tired, and how I had no reason to because the locals lived with it every day.

So that is a brief summary of my first trip. I could probably fill up a couple of posts with detailed stories, but I wont. If you want to hear more or see some photos, I guess you'll just have to contact me.

But that is not all my adventures for the year. In a week and 4 days I will be jetting off to South America for 11 weeks!!!

While over there I will be travelling to Ecuador, Peru and Chile. I will be using the time to hone my Spanish skills, do some holiday and travel (Inca Trail FTW!) and work with some missionaries.

To keep you informed of what I'm doing while away I'll be regularly updating this blog. For those of you who'd rather be notified by email, I've created a google group you can sign upto to receive updates in your mailbox. Simply use the box at the end of this post to sign up. Easy.

It'd be great to hear from you while I'm away too, but please be aware that I won't be able to respond immediately to your email.

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Today's Lesson: In Safari (Apple's browser), don't hit refresh after you've almost finished typing up a big blog post before you've submitted it. The back button won't save you.

I think I'll go to sleep now and start again tomorrow.

Pictured here is my 3 month old niece, Imogen, looking inquisitively at the camera in the cute way only babies can. Prior to her birth there was much speculation as to what her name would be. And as usual no one who guessed was right. I didn't compete, but I wouldn't have got it anyway. But I think Deb and Pete made the right choice with Imogen.

Anyhow, all this talk about names got me thinking about how people go about deciding what to call their children. Often a family name may be adopted according to tradition, or one significant to either parent. The sound of the name, how it rolls off the tongue, may be important to some too.

The ways the name can be changed, shortened and distorted should also be considered. Children at high school are ruthless, and adults aren't much better, so it pays to ensure they won't face needless ridicule, torment and possible psychological damage.

Another factor that seems to be socially important is uniqueness. Probably because people think there are already enough Michaels, Andrews and Davids. But it's getting to a ridiculous level now where people will deliberately misspell a name so that it's different to the other people with the same name.

The existence of the Internet seems to exacerbate this problem further. I've heard that people will choose names based on the availability of the internet domain name, or on how many results show up in Google (the fewer the better). Which is amusing since the usefulness of any domain will stay limited until they're a teenager, by which time your carefully chosen name, with only 10 results in Google, will have been swamped by every other parent who thought the same as you.

With this trend in mind, I have devised another criteria for choosing names: how easy the name is to type on a computer keyboard. With the proliferation of computers it would seem pertinent to pick a name that can be typed efficiently. With all the typing your child will have to do, think of all the hours they will save across the course of their lifetime by choosing a good, typable, name.

Good names would avoid anything that slows down your typing. Things such as repeated letters, consecutive letters that require the same finger to press the key or having all the letters on one side of the keyboard. Some examples of bad names to type are Aaron, Lloyd, Edward, Jill, Phillip or Fredrick.

Perhaps it will get to the stage where people's names will be shortened and mangled on the internet just as the English language has. No longer will someone's name be 'Eugene', but 'Ujyn'; and 'Michael' would become 'Mykl'.

Either way I'm sure it's going to get weirder.

Well it's been a month since my last coffee and I don't think I'll go back to any sort of regular intake.

I'm actually quite surprised at the difference it has made. My mind feels clearer even when I'm not 100%. My tiredness levels are no worse, and best of all I no longer suffer from the buzzy heights and groggy depths of the caffeine roller-coaster - my alertness now follows a much smoother gradient.

That being said though, I will still happily enjoy the odd cup every now and then, just never again in the regular quantities I did in the past.